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Monday, November 24, 2008

Washer Woes


Life may actually be easier with an old fashioned washboard right about now. What's a little manual labor when you don't have to deal with parts and mechanics? What, you may ask, has caused my sudden hatred for the washing machine? Let me start from the beginning.
It started out as a relaxing Saturday evening. Chris and I sat down to watch a movie. The kids were asleep, and I decided to take advantage of the time to do a couple of loads of laundry. I started with the babies clothes which washed without a hitch. Unwittingly I decided to start another load. Our movie ended at about midnight and we were both ready to get some sleep. I stopped at the laundry room to switch my load to the dryer and find that my clothes are sitting in the tub full of water. The spin cycle is frozen. Chris thought maybe the drum was just off balance so he proceeded to remove some clothing to try and redistribute the weight. After removing everything we realize this machine is not going to budge. So at 1am we start to manually scoop out water. We then have a whole load of sopping wet clothes to deal with. We took them to the tub and wrung everything out as much as possible, not wanting to kill our dryer as well. We hang up about half of the clothes and after letting the washer rest we are able to get it to drain the remaining water at the bottom and start the spin cycle. We were so relieved and finally went to bed at 2.
This would be a great way to end the story, but alas there was more fun to be had. Last night I decided to do abother load believing the problem was fixed. I tried to do a smaller load just to test. Well the washer fills up and begins to agitate, but it will no longer drain. We can even move it to the spin cycle, but the water just splashes around without draining. Now we start to wonder if something is clogging the drain. Chris ends up pulling everything out of the wall and inspecting all of the hoses. After a couple more hours of troubleshooting we are left with nothing, but another sopping pile of wet clothes. If I had started out with the washboard I would have been done by now!
As a last resort my dad is coming over to look at it tonight. He is pretty handy with the tools so he can tell us whether or not it is fixable. At this point if it costs too much to fix I could buy another used one for the same price, but we shall see. It is more of an annoyance than anything. Our laundry room is on the second floor, so it is a hassle if the washer has to be moved out. Such is life,but in a world with so many problems, I'm pretty lucky that right now my washer is my biggest woe.

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